It’s about time for another AVNation videocast response from yours truly.
As you may know by now (but it’s okay if you don’t), rAVe [PUBS] has partnered with AVNation to grow the AV industry. Through this partnership, AV Buyers Club — our publication arm specifically for technical end users, in-house integrators and the like — is working with AVNation to create more content specifically for those important people in AV.
Tim Albright recently hosted a videocast with Crestron all about how its solutions helped power the New York Giants’ draft room.
This time, Albright interviews the following people:
- Ty Siam, New York Giants
- Ian Bottiglieri, Image Engineering
- Brad Hintze, Crestron
The first question the group tackles is “why?” Why update the draft room? What wasn’t hitting the mark?
“We had a tremendous amount of information on players, teams and processes,” said Siam. “We wanted to centralize that to make it more efficient and have a showcase room to demonstrate the power of the information we had in our hands.”
So, what does that mean? I don’t claim to know everything about the NFL — much less draft rooms — but I do know these rooms are highly specific. If you need to centralize a ton of stats, data, etc., you’re going to need a pretty kickass setup.
But here’s the double-edged sword: for all the tech that goes into this draft room of all draft rooms, I’m going to guess the people using it day to day aren’t exactly IT pros.
“Accessibility was the main piece that we wanted to drive home,” said Siam. “Any user could come into that room and — based on their levels of sophistication as a user — be able to pull up draft boards and information about players, pull up information about teams and really drive content.”
And that leads me to my next question: How did the Giants assemble this particular team to get the job done?
Let’s start with the integrator. Image Engineering came highly recommended based on work they’d done for other NFL teams. Their background in live events means they’ve got a stacked team: in-house graphic artists (for photo-realistic renderings), mechanical/electrical/show control engineers, a fabrication team, and an installation team — all working to bring each piece of the vision to life.
“The last step is working with our partners at Crestron to make sure that we’re validating the system the way that we’re designing it,” Bottiglieri said.
This Swiss Army knife of a room was designed for videoconferencing, FaceTime, web content, video content, broadcast content, player info, stats … and more. So how the heck does it all work together?
That’s where Crestron comes in.
Yes, draft day was in April, but this room continues to be a mission-critical space for the Giants year-round.
Crestron provided control, video matrixing (for flexibility with all the sources — and trust me, there are a lot), AirMedia and support for videoconferencing.
“For Crestron, the areas that are super important for us are content, video matrixing, collaboration, videoconferencing, intelligent video and, of course, control,” said Hintze. This room brings all of those things to life.”
So yeah. It’s safe to say this draft room has been a success.
But what’s next? Could Crestron become THE go-to draft room AV manufacturer for content and control?
“I’ve gotten a lot of phone calls from all the other NFL teams,” said Hintze. “And some of them have called and said, ‘Hey, how do we get something like that?’ Every time, I say to them. The team had a vision for what they wanted.”
The room speaks for itself. Catch the full convo in the episode here:
